Ship weapon
Ship weapon is a type of ship component. It delivers damage (hopefully a lot of it) to enemy ships. Different chassis can equip 1, 2, 3, or 4 guns which can fire in together, separately, or in groups. *'Tech Level' From 1-10. You can only use weapons you have the certification to use (your trainer doesn't want you playing with trandoshan repeater cannons before you've learned what droid routine is). *'Armor' As decay has been removed from space, armor isn't as significant. *'Hitpoints' Hitpoints go down in combat if damage goes past your shields and armor hitpoints. Reducing hitpoints reduces the effectives of the component. *'Reactor Energy Drain' The gun has two sources of energy; the ships reactors, which powers it at baseline, and the capacitor, which is only used when firing. It drains the reactor by the "reactor energy drain" amount constantly (firing or not). This value is modified by weapon overload droid routines. WO2 drains by 2x, WO3 drains by 2.86, WO4 drains by 5x. If you overburden your reactor your guns will be disabled. However, even if the weapons are underpowered they will still work, just at a reduced effectiveness (reduced by the % underpowered). So clearly, a high drain gun is going to be outclassed by a low drain gun, because you will be able to more easily run a weapon overload routine. *'Damage' Damage is given in a min - max range, and the actual damage is a random number inbetween the two multiplied by the "vs." number. Damage that penetrates the shields is incurred similarly by multiplying by the "vs. armor" number. Damage in pvp is 50% of expected. Damage output is increased by using weapon overload commands. *'VS. Shields/Armor' Some weapons are good only at taking down shields, and some only at melting armor. A good weapon is good at both. The "vs." number is multiplied by the damage to calculate the actual damage done to either shields or armor. In order to build a gun with high vs. shields and armor, a shipwright will Re-Engineer (Reverse Engineer) a gun with a high vs. shields and a gun with high vs. armor and combine them. "Ion Cannons" are guns with high vs. shields (and usually low vs. armor). "Disruptors" are guns with high vs. armor (and usually low vs. shields). *'Energy Per Shot (eps)' The amount the capacitor is drained with each shot. Like reactor drain, this amount is increased by running weapon overload routines. It is always desireable to have the eps as low as possible, as this affects two important parts of combat; the ability to sustain fire and the ability to shunt larger amounts of capacitor energy to shields. Weapons can be crafted to have low eps with the "speed limiter" sub (and as the name implies, this also slows the weapons). *'Refire Rate' How fast your gun can fire. A gun with a refire rate of 0.25 is twice as fast as a gun with 0.5 refire (these are not common refire rates, this is just for illustration). While it would make sense that a refire rate of 0.25 would mean a gun fires 4 times/sec, this is not exactly the case. The actual calc is something like rate * 0.75. In any case, an important number when comparing guns is the damage per second. Like ground weapons, a heavy hitting gun that fires only one or two times a second may be outclassed by a fast firing gun with smaller max damage. However, keep in mind that a fast firing gun will also drain your cap faster. In general refire rates on looted weapons range from 0.3 to 0.4. A very popular crafted weapon is the "quickshot" weapon, which in the hands of somebody who knows what they are doing, can have a refire rate of 0.25-0.26. Buying Guide For imperial pilots, who grind using a single gun ship, having a nice weapon makes grinding easy. I recommend either a crafted quickshot blaster or a re'd weapon for the early grind. You will benefit from running weapon overload and capacitor overload as well, which you should be able to fit, as the small, nimble imperial ships usually do not need engine overload. For rebels and freelance pilots using multigun ships, there's no need to fret over weapons in the early grind. But about the time when you start facing tier 3-4 ships you will need to take a closer look at weapon stats. Instead of giving a prescription of what to use, I'll make some suggestions as to what not to do. Don't use 3 quickshot weapons in the same ship, you'll drain your capacitor too quickly. Don't have a much higher vs. shield than armor or vice-versus (npc ships stupidly have the equivalent amount of shield as armor so you need equal effectivness (this isn't entirely accurate - npc actually have more armor than shields, but not by that much)). One idea is to use 3 low eps guns in a 3 gun ship and 2 max dmg guns in a 2 gun ship. You can probably get away with 2 quickshot guns in a 2 gun ship if you don't run a high weapon overload and you have a respectable capacitor. A re'ing guide to guns really deserves it's own page, but here are some basics. First thing is that re'd weapons can really put to shame crafted guns - if they are re'd right! So the second point is don't re unless you know what you're doing or are working with somebody who does. There is this mistaken idea that just because something is re'd it's going to be good. That's not true in the slightest. It takes putting together the right parts to make a good re product. There are several reward weapons that can be the basis of re projects. These include the borstel/tri-cannon, the imperial awarded "boltdriver", the ionic pulse weapon (reward for completing CPG quest), the Trandoshian Repeater Cannon (Avatar Platform Reward) and the Correlians Beamrail (Nyms starmap quest reward). Ship weapons See also *Ship component *Ship *Pilot Category:Ship components